Voice discrimination in cochlear implant users

Abstract Due to the limited processing of spectral cues, voice discrimination might be restricted in cochlear implant (CI) users. A very basic representation of different voices is given by the speaker gender. Important characteristics are the fundamental frequency (f0) and the vocal tract length (VTL) which influences formant frequencies. Based on a natural utterance these parameters were explicitly modified and the resulting psychoacoustic effects were assessed in a speaker gender discrimination and a speaker gender identification experiment. It could be shown, that CI-users needed about two times higher changes in f0 and more than three times higher changes in the formant frequencies (F1 – F3) to discriminate different voices. However, this discrimination ability was obviously sufficient to identify the speaker gender, since the results did not differ much between CI-recipients and normal listeners in the identification experiment. The most important parameter was f0, whereas VTL alone did not allow consistent identification ofthe speaker gender. For speaker identification in general VTL parameters might be more important. Voice discrimination in cochlear implant users